Oracle OpenWorld 2015 - Summary

This year I attended the Oracle OpenWorld conference for the second time (my first time was last year), and it was amazing! Many customers came to visit Dell's booth to learn about our Oracle-related solutions for monitoring, replication, management, etc. The sessions were really good and Elton John gave a great show at the appreciation event.

Below are some pictures of myself having fun and also explaining about the advantages of Foglight for Oracle to the conference attendees who came to visit Dell's booth:

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 is taking place next week!

As you probably know, Oracle OpenWorld 2015 is taking place next week (October 25-29, 2015).
I'd like to invite you all to visit Dell's booth #601 and learn how Dell can help you maximize your Oracle investment by improving database performance, administration, change management, and more.

You can meet me at at Dell's booth and I'd be happy to show you how Oracle DBAs are winning performance challenges using Foglight for Oracle

12.1.0.2 New Feature - PDB State Management Across CDB Restart

Introduction

In this post I'd like to review a very useful feature that was introduced in version 12.1.0.2 - PDB State Management Across CDB Restart. In version 12.1.0.1, after instance restart you will notice that the Pluggable Databases (PDBs) are MOUNTED, i.e. they are not accesible to the users. It doesn't matter if before the restart the PDB was MOUNTED or OPEN, in any case after the restart it will be MOUNTED. let's see a demonstartion for that:

This means that after every restart of the instance DBA need to manually start the Pluggable Databases in order to make it accessible to the users.

12.1.0.2 solution - "Save State" clause

The solution for this behaviour was introduced with version 12.1.0.2 which provides an option to execute a command that will set the state of a PDB so in the next time that the instance will be started, the open mode of that PDB will be remains the same as it was when we executed the ALTER PLUGGABLE DATABASE ... SAVE STATE command. Let's see a demonstration

As you can see, after I exectued "ALTER PLUGGABLE DATABASE ... SAVE STATE" command, the PDB open mode remains the same (OPEN) after I restarted the instance.

Few Notes:

• You can query DBA_PDB_SAVED_STATES dictinoary view which shows information about the current saved PDB states in the CDB.
• You can discard the state of a PDB in order to make the open mode mounted again in the next instance reboot. Below is a demonstartion of this:

Useful Links:

• Oracle Doc 12.1.0.2 New Features - PDB State Management
• Oracle Doc Reference - DBA_PDB_SAVED_STATES

How to resolve PRVF-0002: could not retrieve local node name

Introduction

In this short post I'd like to show you how to resolve error "PRVF-0002: could not retrieve local node name". When I started an Oracle 12.1.0.2 installation on Solaris x86-64 (Version [11.2] Description [SunOS 5.11]) I encountered the following error:

Solution

First, verify that the "hostname" command returns the host name:

isrvmsol07:ora[43] /oravl01/database> hostname

isrvmsol07

Afterwards check that /etc/hosts file, and if you find out that the hostname doesn't appear for the local IP address (127.0.0.1), add the following entry to the /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1       isrvmsol07

Re-execute the installation and then everything should work properly:

Conclusion

At the start of the installation Oracle performs healthcheck test for forward and reverse resolution of the host name so you can fix it by setting properly the DNS or maunally set the host IP address and name in the /etc/hosts file.